More on The Cask of Amontillado

Setting
An underground catacomb, somewhere in Italy, during the
carnival season
The setting in “The Cask,” and in most Horror or Gothic Fiction, has a special
purpose: to suggest freedom or confinement, in harmony or opposition to the
freedom or confinement of the characters. This is called the “Gothic Interior.”
Most people go back and forth between feeling free and feeling trapped. The
Gothic Interior is meant to make us hyperaware of these emotions through
careful attention to the setting.
When we look at the settings of “The Cask,” we can see that the story has a
distinct movement from freedom to confinement.
First, let’s start with the country. Italy doesn’t directly factor into this formula
of the Gothic Interior, at least not in an obvious way. It might have something
to do with the guy who wrote the first explicitly “Gothic” story, The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Story. That guy is Horace Walpole, and when he first
published Otranto, he claimed that it was a translation of an old Italian
manuscript he found. When the story became a huge success, he confessed
that he wrote it himself.
Not so coincidentally, Otranto has much to do with freedom and
confinement. In a nutshell, it’s about a giant gold helmet falling from the sky
and trapping a guy underneath it. So, the Italian setting is probably Poe’s nod
to Walpole.
The carnival season and the Montresor family catacomb are a bit more direct.
The carnival is a literal celebration of freedom, which both Montresor and
Fortunato are participating in at the beginning of the story.
As they journey through the catacomb, Montresor and Fortunato move into
smaller and smaller − and fouler and fouler − spaces. This suggesting that, as
they travel farther away from fresh air, they are also moving further away
from freedom.
Fortunato is eventually trapped in a space that represents the opposite of
freedom: he’s chained up and bricked inside a man-sized crypt with no air
and no way out. You can certainly argue that Montresor presents a contrast
to Fortunato’s fate in that he finds freedom at the end of the story: he is alive.
Montresor is free to do as he wishes. Ironically, what he wishes to do is tell
this story. Which means that the story has him trapped. He can’t forget it,
and he has to talk about it. In his mind, he’s still down there in the hole with
Fortunato.

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The Cask of Amontillado Setting Study

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